They say all is fair in love and war…you can add business onto that list too I suppose. No one ever said that life or business was fair or was even supposed to be. Local search marketing is a perfect example. I’ll use Minnie as my hypothetical for the example.

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Minnie has been doing nails in the same city in the same location for over 10 years. She is quite good at what she does and has a very good business head on her shoulders…in most ways. She has a huge following of satisfied and repeat customers. Her business has never been better even though the economy has hammered many. In fact, new clients continued streaming in at higher and higher rates – life is good.

She has maintained the same quarter-page Yellow Page ad for the past 8 years without changes. “Why change something when all is going so well?” Minnie asks her Yellow Pages rep each year.

Here is what Minnie does not know:

Here success with Yellow Pages goes down each year as its usage goes down as more and more folks use the Internet to find what they need. Of course she has no idea how effective her phone book ads are because she has never tracked any of her advertising to determine ROI.

If she DID ask every new customer how they found her, she would find that over half of them are coming to her via the Internet. Actually, a search for “nail salons” in her city results in Google showing her business in the number 5 position in the local listings area (right by the Google map on the first page of that search).

Being listed on the 1st page of local business listings in Google is AWESOME for any business. But sadly, Minnie had no idea how or why she was listed there. Google just liked her shop she guessed.

A few months later, after years of steady new business, she noticed the calls from new customers dropped dramatically. The change seemed almost overnight in fact. After several more months of thinking it was just a “slump”, she began to panic a bit and do some checking on things. She discovered her local listing on Google was gone from the first page. In fact, it was only in the third position on the SECOND page! She had no idea why Google “had done that to her”. She wondered how important that listing had been for her….hmmm.

Nothing is fair in life or business. Google does not rank based on their “emotions”. Competitors are always circling.

Here’s what happened. A few of Minnie’s competitors took notice of her and the other lucky souls who dominated the first page for that category of local listings. THEY knew how valuable that position was even though Minnie did not.

They began hammering away at the process of moving up in rankings. They did all the right things to prove their listing worthy of the first page. They got reviews on a steady basis, they added video, pictures and coupons to their listing to not only attract new customers but to add to the listings’ “time on page” which Google watches, they worked very hard at getting off-page references to their listings, and they build a killer website fully SEO’d and got it ranking well in the organic results.

A few of those competitors “stole” Minnie’s first page position from her…all’s fair in love and business.

Is it all over for Minnie? Of course not! All she has to do is learn local search marketing as her competitors did…and then get to work implementing and making her business and it’s listing more relevant in Google’s eyes. Just a few minutes a week of focused action could quite possible make all the difference in the world for her business.